CHAPTER X THE MACHINE-TRAINERS The fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-assertion. The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is machinery. Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the cooeperative action of individuals. If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them together according to their nature, we can only make vast masses of men work by putting them together according to their nature. So far we have been trying to make vast masses of men work together in precisely the same way we make levers and iron wheels work together. We have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials of which they are made. We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines. We have let our iron machines assert themselves against us. We have let our iron machines be models for us. We have overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in machines of iron and machines of men. A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else. In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the author of his own acts. In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are individuals. Society is organically, irrevocably dependent upon each man, and upon what each man chooses according to his own nature to do himself. The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of each man who is, as we look him over and take him up, and propose to put him into it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you want?" "How can you get it?" Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal, patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him, inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it, and let us work it into the common end. In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of ourselves. Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will grow up.